This text was written to clarify recurring conceptual and terminological ambiguities in current discussions on hoof mechanics, ground reaction forces, and biotensegrity. It is not directed at individual people, but at a structural pattern: the mixing of different explanatory levels and the misinterpretations that arise from it.
The aim is to make clear where the limits of certain models lie, what they are capable of explaining, and to establish clear criteria for scientific explanation.
■ Biotensegrity is a structural organizational model of living systems. It describes how structural organization allows forces to be received, distributed, stored, and utilized within a living body.
■ An approach that recognizes biotensegrity as a scientific framework cannot simultaneously dismiss practical work based on this model as ridiculous or unscientific. Both positions cannot logically be held at the same time. Either the model is scientifically relevant—in which case it must be integrated into the overall explanatory framework—or it is not.
■ When biotensegrity is claimed as a modern scientific concept without taking into account what it structurally describes and how these structures behave in reality, it remains a matter of rhetorical appropriation.
■ Contact-surface models describe local pressure and force conditions and allow these to be calculated. Biotensegrity describes the structural organization of the system as a whole. These explanatory levels are not interchangeable.
■ Ground reaction forces always act on the system’s center of mass, regardless of where and through which contact surface they enter the body. During movement, a horse’s center of mass is generally not located above the respective ground contact area. Nevertheless, impulses from the ground are effectively received, stored, and used for movement and stabilization. The effectiveness of these forces arises from the organization of the entire system, not from the geometry of the contact surface relative to a single reference point.
■ Biotensegral stability and movement do not arise at the contact surface, but from the organization of the whole system. The contact surface is the point of force entry, not the location where their effects are generated.
■ A model that analyzes contact forces exclusively in relation to a specific anatomical reference point can neither confirm nor refute biotensegrity. It operates on a different explanatory level.
■ Scientific rigor consists in developing appropriate models and evaluating them according to whether they explain what is actually observed. Models do not need to represent the entirety of reality, but they must correctly describe essential aspects of it. Being correctly calculated does not mean being well explained.
Model limits and living systems
A scientifically sound model must also be able to recognize its own limits. Models do not have to explain everything, but they must make clear which phenomena lie outside their explanatory scope.
■ Purely computational models are suitable for describing clearly defined, highly constrained situations in a formally correct way. However, they are not capable of capturing the open solution space of living systems. Living beings possess numerous equally valid movement and problem-solving strategies that unfold in a context-dependent, adaptive, and non-prescriptive manner. This diversity is not a source of error, but a fundamental property of biological systems.
■ A computational model that implicitly prescribes a single “correct” solution thereby provides answers to questions that life itself does not ask. It reduces real movement organization to a predefined outcome through normativity.
■ A model that claims explanatory power must therefore also be able to account for stable and reproducible observations, even when they contradict its own predictions. This includes the observation that, in a large number of horses, a front hoof with a dorsal hoof wall angle of approximately 45° to 47°, with the toe fully preserved, functions in a stable and functional manner. It also includes the demonstrable fact that horses with previously multiple, chronic, or recurrent pathologies become resilient, sound, and sustainably stable under these conditions.
■ If a model cannot explain these observations and instead dismisses them as exceptions, errors, coincidences, or “incorrect application,” then it is reality that exposes the model’s failure.
■ Where a model cannot represent the complex problem-solving capacity of living systems, this does not indicate a deficiency of practice, but the boundary of the model itself.
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